Not worrying about keeping your team busy is very powerful
Because everyone stays focused on top priorities and you don't pay for their excess capacity
I managed people for almost twenty years the old way.
I considered myself a ‘master multi-tasker’ who could keep lots of people busy at the same time.
When I was a strategy consultant I used to sweep up all the free resources that weren’t assigned to projects and have them work on one of my projects.
I thought it was a great asset.
And in a way it was back in those old days.
I could get a lot more done than most managers.
But now I never worry about keeping anyone busy.
Mainly because I don’t pay anyone a fixed salary. Everyone is paid either based on hours or scope of work.
And it’s had terrific impacts that I want to discuss today.
The ‘keep your team busy’ mindset
Most good managers will have a knack for this. Because you’re just utilizing your resources that are already paid for.
In most traditional companies everyone is a salaried employee. And so they get paid regardless of whether you give them any work to do or not.
Therefore if you’re managing them you might as well give them work to do.
And in my experience this becomes a pretty big time commitment. Because you’re giving them tasks that might be 2nd or 3rd level priorities.
And then you need to check to make sure that they’re on track with this work otherwise they might go in the wrong direction and it will be a waste of time.
Sure some managers don’t do this… but then you have team members that are sitting idle 50% of the day or more.
And in my experience idle time leads to bad things…
… more politics
…more ‘pretending that they’re working a lot’ so as not to seem idle
…etc.
So there are negative consequences to leaving people idle as well. Not to mention the fact that you’re paying them for a full-time role when in fact they’re only working less than half the time.
The Beast Method alleviates the need to keep people busy
When I started using the Beast Method a little over four years ago I started breaking free of this old mindset that I had to keep people busy.
Because I was only paying them for what they did.
I didn’t care what they did with the rest of their time.
And this meant that I could focus only on the top priorities while knowing that I wasn’t wasting any money by keeping people idle.
By staying focused on top priorities… I kept the balls that were in the air on track far better. Because I wasn’t wasting time on low priority tasks.
Plus there was not really downside to leaving these freelancers idle because I wasn’t paying for them. And they felt no need to ‘appear busy’… meaning they didn’t engage in politics, etc.
As it would have served no purpose.
Doing this also helps separate the great from the good from the bad
By this I mean that everyone in your team is working on high priority work.
You no longer have situations where an ok person looks good because they’re working on the high priority stuff and someone that is great doesn’t shine through because they’re working on the low priority work.
Rather in this system the person that is great will be underutilized and you’ll be thinking more about how to utilize them more. But everything they do will have real impact because its high priority work.
I don’t know how many times in my corporate career I saw great people doing a great job on low priority work but getting very little recognition because people just didn’t care about what they were doing.
In this system that low priority work just doesn’t get done. Period.
You have more resources to find people that are great
This is the other part of this system that I love.
You’re not making commitments to people.. You can just continue trying people until you have a very solid team.
You know how almost all CEO’s have stories of making hiring mistakes? Well i have no such stories with Reviv and don’t expect to have them.
Because I correct these mistakes in weeks. I gave them a small project… and if they didn’t do a good job, I didn’t give them more projects.
It’s not that I ‘fired’ them or something dramatic. I just reduce the amount of work I give them to nothing and then eventually tell them I have nothing for them.
We walk away friends (usually).
At the same time i’m testing one or two new people to find someone that I think is gonna rock it.
Sound a bit cuthroat? Perhaps.. but I think it ends up being a very good thing for the team. When there is a person that is dragging it brings the whole team down and can impact others’ motivation.
Closing thoughts
I have a friend I used to know from over a decade ago that is running a SaaS company for over 10+ years and they seem to be doing well. Not long ago he put a picture of his entire team and there were about 25 people or so.
He was proud that they’d raised very little funding and were profitable.
I was also proud of him.
But then another mutual friend of ours that talks to him told me a bit more details. And their annual profit was in the low 5-figures (i’d guestimate $50k/year) with an annual growth rate that had dropped to like 15%.
I found myself scratching my head.. 10+ years of work to eke out $50k/year with a 15% growth rate? That sounds like a lot of work for a pretty small pot of gold.
I bet if I was running his team i’d be able to operate everything they are doing now at a headcount cost that is perhaps 30% of what they are paying. Because that is consistently around the number i’ve seen the past 4-5 years when implementing Beast Method with clients.
So let’s now apply this to a team of 25 who let’s say are making an average salary of $36k/year (many of his team members are in cheaper Eastern European countries).
The headcount savings calculation is:
= 25 people x $36k x 70% cost reduction
= $630k cost savings
Now if it was my company and I could pay this out to myself as a dividend. I’d be far happier paying myself $630k per year than $50k. Wouldn’t you?
Especially since a 15% annual growth rate is not going to be attracting some massive valuation to exit on.
That, my friends, is the power of not worrying about keeping people busy!